When Does Self-supervision Improve Few-shot Learning? - A Reproducibility Report

A reproduction of the paper When Does Self-supervision Improve Few-shot Learning? (ECCV 2020). We also have some interesting results beyond the paper. The authors' official repository is here.

As part of the ML Reproducibility Challenge Spring 2021.

Table of contents

Please click each of the sections below to jump to its contents.

1. Installation Instructions

2. Datasets

3. Training & Inference

   3.1. General Instructions

   3.2. Examples

4. Domain selection

1. Installation Instructions

Execute this to install all the dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Datasets

In total, we support a total of 10 datasets for training and inference. Apart from this, we support one more dataset for the domain selection experiments.

The datasets, details, download links, location are below:

Dataset	Download Link	Extraction Location
CUB-birds	https://www.kaggle.com/tarunkr/caltech-birds-2011-dataset	filelists/CUB/images
VGG flowers	https://www.kaggle.com/arjun2000ashok/vggflowers/	filelists/flowers/images
Stanford Cars	https://www.kaggle.com/hassiahk/stanford-cars-dataset-full	filelists/cars/images
Stanford Dogs	https://www.kaggle.com/jessicali9530/stanford-dogs-dataset	filelists/dogs/images
FGVC - Aircrafts	https://www.kaggle.com/seryouxblaster764/fgvc-aircraft	filelists/aircrafts/images
MiniImageNet	https://www.kaggle.com/arjunashok33/miniimagenet	filelists/miniImagenet/images

If you are using the Aircrafts dataset, you should run utils/crop_aircrafts.py. It will be crop the bottom 20 rows of the image which contain the image credits. In the original repository, this is done in the code. To optimize that, this script has been provided.

For the cross-domain experiments, we list the datasets here for convinience. These links are taken from the CDFSL benchmark repository.

Dataset	Download Link	Extraction Location
ChestX	https://www.kaggle.com/nih-chest-xrays/data	filelists/ChestX/images
ISIC	https://challenge.isic-archive.com - NOTE: needs login	filelists/ISIC/images
EuroSAT	http://madm.dfki.de/files/sentinel/EuroSAT.zip	filelists/EuroSAT/images
CropDisease	https://www.kaggle.com/saroz014/plant-disease/	filelists/CropDisease/images

3. Training & Inference

3.1 General Instructions

All scripts must be executed from the root folder

The train.py file is used for training, validation and testing.

It trains the few-shot model for a fixed number of episodes, with periodic evalution on the validation set, followed by testing on the test set.

Note that all the results reported are based on training for a fixed number of epochs, and then evaluating using the best model found using the validation set.

Please see utils/io_utils.py for all the arguments and their default values. Here are some sufficient examples:

python train.py --help will print the help for all the necessary arguments:

usage: train.py [-h] [--dataset DATASET] [--model MODEL] [--method METHOD]
                [--train_n_way TRAIN_N_WAY] [--test_n_way TEST_N_WAY]
                [--n_shot N_SHOT] [--train_aug [TRAIN_AUG]]
                [--jigsaw [JIGSAW]] [--lbda LBDA] [--lr LR]
                [--optimization OPTIMIZATION] [--loadfile LOADFILE]
                [--finetune] [--random] [--n_query N_QUERY]
                [--image_size IMAGE_SIZE] [--debug] [--json_seed JSON_SEED]
                [--date DATE] [--rotation [ROTATION]] [--grey]
                [--low_res [LOW_RES]] [--firstk FIRSTK] [--testiter TESTITER]
                [--wd WD] [--bs BS] [--iterations ITERATIONS] [--useVal]
                [--scheduler [SCHEDULER]] [--lbda_jigsaw LBDA_JIGSAW]
                [--lbda_rotation LBDA_ROTATION] [--pretrain [PRETRAIN]]
                [--dataset_unlabel DATASET_UNLABEL]
                [--dataset_unlabel_percentage DATASET_UNLABEL_PERCENTAGE]
                [--dataset_percentage DATASET_PERCENTAGE] [--bn_type BN_TYPE]
                [--test_bs TEST_BS] [--split SPLIT] [--save_iter SAVE_ITER]
                [--adaptation] [--device DEVICE] [--seed SEED] [--amp [AMP]]
                [--num_classes NUM_CLASSES] [--save_freq SAVE_FREQ]
                [--start_epoch START_EPOCH] [--stop_epoch STOP_EPOCH]
                [--resume] [--warmup] [--eval_interval EVAL_INTERVAL]
                [--run_name RUN_NAME] [--run_id RUN_ID]
                [--semi_sup [SEMI_SUP]] [--sup_ratio SUP_RATIO]
                [--only_test [ONLY_TEST]] [--project PROJECT]
                [--save_model [SAVE_MODEL]] [--demo [DEMO]]
                [--only_train [ONLY_TRAIN]] [--sweep [SWEEP]]

--device is used to specify the GPU device. --seed is used to specify the seed. The default --train_aug is used to specify if there should be data augmentation. All results in the paper and the report are done with data augmentation. It is by default True. --stop_epoch is used the number of epochs. It is recommended to run the small dataset models for 500 epochs, and the miniImageNet models for 700 epochs. The best model picked by validation will be evaluated at the end. --lr is the learning rate.

--loadfile can be used to provide a path for loading a pretrained model. Note that the model should be of the same architecture as given in the --model argument.

--only_train can be used to only train the models, and stop before testing them. --only_test can be used to only test the models. Note that a model path needs to be provided if you are testing a pretrained model.

--resume can be used to resume a run. If --resume is provided, the --run_id must also be provided to resume the corresponding W&B run. By default, as line 362 of train.py indicates, the last model will be retrieved from W&B automatically, and loaded. Note that I have saved the epoch also, and hence the --start_epoch will be automatically set. The --stop_epoch must be provided in all cases.

--bn_type can be set to 1, 2 or 3 to set the respective type of batch norm used.

NUM_WORKERS for all the dataloaders can be set at config/configs.py.

3.2 Examples

NOTE: For the exact commands used, you can refer to each run in the respective project in the W&B dashboard. We provide a detailed list of all the possible configurations below.

Supervised training

For training a ProtoNet 5-way 5-shot model on CUB dataset with resnet18 and image size 224, for 600 epochs (LR=0.01):

python train.py --dataset=CUB --model=resnet18 --method=protonet --train_n_way=5 --test_n_way=5 --n_shot=5 --train_aug --stop_epoch=600 --lr=0.01.

For Conv4 architecture and image size 84, use --image_size=84 --model=Conv4.

With Self-Supervised learning (SSL)

For training with jigsaw with a specific loss weightage, use --jigsaw --lbda=LBDA where LBDA is substituted by the weightage.

For training with rotation with a specific loss weightage, use --rotation --lbda=LBDA where LBDA is substituted by the weightage.

For training with both jigsaw and rotation, use --rotation --jigsaw --lbda_jigsaw=LBDA_JIGSAW --lbda_rotation=LBDA_ROTATION where LBDA_JIGSAW and LBDA_ROTATION is substituted by the weightage of jigsaw and rotation in the loss functions respectively. The supervised loss in this case will be automatically set to 1 - LBDA_JIGSAW - LBDA_ROTATION.

Using other datasets for SSL

For using other datasets for self-supervised learning, --dataset_unlabel=DATASET must be provided. Note that in this case --jigsaw --lbda=X or --rotation --lbda=X or --rotation --jigsaw --lbda_jigsaw=LBDA_JIGSAW --lbda_rotation=LBDA_ROTATION must also be provided as self-supervision is used.

To use only a fraction of the other dataset for self-supervised learning, along with the above command, --dataset_unlabel_percentage can be set to 20, 40, 60 or 80.

To use only a fraction of the other dataset for supervised learning, --dataset_percentage can be set to 20, 40, 60 or 80.

Both of the above commands will use the respective file from filelists/{DATASET}.

For testing on CDFSL datasets

For this, use cdfsl_test.py. By default, I have provided the corresponding table name from W&B. As I have saved all the checkpoints in W&B, it will automatically download them, test on all the 4 CDFSL datasets and return the results.

4. Domain selection

We have implemented the domain selection algorithm from scratch.

To conduct domain selection, the open images dataset train set (513 GB) and INat dataset train set (224 GB) needs to be downloaded and put at filelists/open-images/images and filelists/inat/images respectively.

As we could not afford storage for such huge datasets, we used the validation datasets instead (found in the same URLs).

After that, python domain/importance_weights.py should be run with arguments --positive_json indicating the dataset for which the images need to be selected (paths of the json files of CUB/aircrafts/cars/dogs/flowers), and --save_path=SAVE_PATH.json indicating the save path of the json containing a list of the respective selected images for the dataset.

This will get the image features from an ImageNet-pretrained ResNet-101, train a logistic regression model with the positive images as the dataset images and negative images from the two new datasets, and select the optimal images for SSL.

An example is below:

python domain/importance_weights.py --positive_json=filelists/CUB/base.json --save_path=filelists/CUB/selected_domain_images.json

After this, the usual training can be done with dataset_unlabel=filelists/CUB/selected_domain_images.json.